Ralf Rothmann

Knife Edge (Messers Schneide), originally published in Germany in 1986, introduces American readers to the work of Ralf Rothmann, an award-winning poet and novelist born in Schleswig in 1953. Set in West Berlin before the collapse of The Wall, Knife Edge on its surface is a sardonic love story gone awry. Manfred Assen, an indecisive writer-manqué who drives a taxi, is pursued by Iris, who insists on her entitlement, as a woman, to a child.…

New Directions was founded in 1936, when James Laughlin (1914–1997), then a twenty-two-year-old Harvard sophomore, issued the first of the New Directions anthologies. “I asked Ezra Pound for ‘career advice,’” Laughlin recalled. “He had been seeing my poems for months and had ruled them hopeless. He urged me to finish Harvard and then do ‘something’ useful.”